BWW Reviews: Life Domesticated, Art Emboldened in PICASSO & JACQUELINE: THE EVOLUTION OF STYLE

Because great art so often results from tumult, it can be instructive to see what happens when a great artist finally settles down. In some cases, such an artist will take leave of any and all meaningful reality: to go as far as a powerful imagination could go, then lapse into overdone and empty fancy, was the approach that Joyce and Nabokov and Fellini all fell into in their last productions. Picasso, though, played his endgame differently. He trained his sights on the realities in front of him--in many cases, on his partner and eventual wife Jacqueline Roque--and created an assured and unworried body of work. The results of such labor are now on display in Picasso & Jacqueline: The Evolution of Style, an 140-item exhibition staged by Pace Gallery and centered on Picasso's halcyon final two decades--his personal life finally free of drama and his style released from many of its earlier uncertainties.

This has been a year to remember for all things Picasso. Pace has devoted two of its ample facilities--one uptown, one downtown--to Picasso & Jacqueline. And other Manhattan-based exhibitions have exposed other aspects of Picasso's life and art: the Gagosian Gallery's Picasso and the Camera captures Picasso's relationship to photography, while the Metropolitan Museum's Cubism: The Leonard A. Lauder Collection provides a group portrait of one of modernism's defining movements, with Picasso planted right in the middle. If it weren't for the peerless Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs at MoMA, this would probably be Picasso's season. But as it is, Picasso & Jacqueline reminds us that Picasso, as a matter of working method, always needed something to push back against--Jacqueline, Matisse, a still life, an entire branch of art history. He always needed a measure of reality within easy reach.

If you would like to proceed chronologically, begin wth the downtown segment of Picasso & Jacqueline and work your way north. The Pace installation at 25th Street is structured around Picasso's series Women of Algiers (1954-1955), designed both as an homage to Matisse and as a response to the legacy of Eugène Delacroix. Many of the largest canvases have also been set up at the 25th Street location, which is why the 57th Street offering can come off as a collection of noteworthy odds and ends. But this second installation also shows Picasso working across media--sculpture, pencil sketches, cardboard profiles of Jacqueline, multiple linoleum-on-paper renditions of the same female face. The last of these are part Jacqueline, part generic womanhood, all color.

While Jacqueline's figure is distorted beyond recognition in several images, other drawings and canvases are more faithful to her dark hair, her compact frame, her Romanesque profile, and especially her large, vivid, knowing eyes. In short, she looks like an after-the-fact Demoiselle d'Avignon. The many photos of Picasso and Jacqueline at the downtown location show the artist and his occasional model lounging around, dancing, dining, and generally enjoying each other's company. This may not seem important at all, except that the paintings themselves draw on this atmosphere of leisure and mild humor: the colors are often as vivid as they were in Picasso's 1920s output, but the formal jitters are all gone.

So there is much confidence here, but little that feels genuinely new. By the time he met Jacqueline, Picasso knew that he was assured a spot in the art historical canon; his last two or even three decades can be understood as one great effort to firm up his place among the greats. Not just Matisse and Delacroix, but El Greco, Velázquez, and Manet are among the artists he referenced. The problem is that all of them were referenced in the same heavily-outlined, scrunched-forward style--a style that reached its apotheosis in Guernica but came back to earth, and got stuck in place, during the years of Picasso & Jacqueline. Only in Woman in the Studio (1956)--which recalls the austere, ambiguous paintings that Matisse created during World War I--does Picasso really push beyond his usual techniques. The rest is at some level theme and variation, and not necessarily Picasso's finest themes. His portraits of Jacqueline are consistently affectionate, but they lack the lyric and symbolic richness of Picasso's blue period families, of his rose period circus performers, and of that marvelous, cast-in-bronze goat--a realism-inflected departure from "style," and a welcome one--that he crafted in 1950.

Yet to see these shortcomings, you need to be far from any actual Pace gallery, well beyond Picasso's charms. Both installments of Picasso & Jacqueline are handsome, almost virile displays, glossed over with old European sophistication but still bristling with eros and earthiness. Taking these paintings in is more like drinking cocktail after cocktail than like anything else. The experience is not particularly filling and it may warp your judgment, but it is thoroughly enjoyable and it will leave you at peace with Picasso, with Jacqueline, with the delectations of Picasso's last period.

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